Tuesday, January 07, 2014

The Republican National Committee today becomes the latest group to blast Democratic U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan over the Affordable Care Act.

The RNC launches radio ads in North Carolina and other congressional battlegrounds today accusing Hagan and other Democratic lawmakers of assuring voters they could keep their current health plans under the law known as Obamacare.

"They lied," an announcer says in the ad.

In a statement, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said, "These Democrats repeated the lie that people could keep their healthcare plans under ObamaCare. Cancelled plans and increased premiums prove they cannot be trusted to keep their promises.”

The radio ads are airing in Asheville, Charlotte, Raleigh and the Greensboro/Winston-Salem market in addition to the one in Grenville/Spartanburg South Carolina.

Similar ads are being run in the home states of seven other senators and four members of the House.

4 comments:

Sen. Hagen should consider the course followed by Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland on these Affordable Health Care developments. Sen. Mikulski, surely one of the strongest liberal Democratic voices in the U.S. Senate, said early on in effect, hey, we must give thorough scrutiny to some of these unexpected cost factors and work to improve this health care legislation.

Sen. Barbara Mikulsi is providing a timely reminder to Democratic senators that it is not a breach of party loyalty to raise questions about unexpected problems in major legislature initiated by a Democratic administration and supported by Democrats in both houses of Congress.

Sen. Kay Hagen's late uncle, Florida Gov. and Sen. Lawton Chiles, was a strong and effective advocate for meeting urgent needs of the people but with sensible, cost-effective and consumer-friendly programs and measures that would not increase financial burdens either on the citizenry at large or the government itself.

Thus Sen. Hagen would do well to follow her own "Family Tradition" in overseeing health care legislation for this country, and she has the erudition and independent-mindedness to carry out these important tasks.

What Senator Hagan, President Obama, and most other Democrats wanted was to convert this clunky and inefficient mess of a health care system we had to a streamlined and efficient single-payer system like every other first world democracy on the planet has already implemented. Expanding Medicare to cover the entire population would have been the best option not only to insure coverage for everyone, but to best control costs in the long run. Indeed, as most medical professionals will tell you, it's the ONLY way to accomplish both aims.

But since the GOP and the private health insurance companies won't allow that, this incredibly complicated compromise was the best solution possible if we were to have any health care reform at all.

Nobody realized at the time that the GOP would fight just as hard against the ACA, which was based on THEIR ideas originally conceived in the Heritage Foundation and which formed the basis for Romneycare in their last presidential candidate's own state. Certainly, President Obama didn't expect the vitriol and intransigent opposition he's gotten when he basically adopted their own program as his. He vastly overestimated their willingness to govern in the best interest of the American people, a concession he no doubt gravely regrets at this point.

That said, the best we can hope for now, absent a new push for single-payer (which will have to come eventually if the entire system is to be saved from complete collapse), is to try and fix the problems with the ACA as best we can. And the best way to do that is to make sure we keep a Democratic majority in the Senate.

If the GOP re-takes that body, then they'll gut the ACA and all the hope it represents for the millions of Americans who will now have affordable insurance for the first time in their lives, and whose lives will be measurably improved because of it. Lost also will be the last hope for meaningful reform for generations to come.